City, MU join group seeking ultrafast Internet

Wednesday

Jul 27, 2011 at 12:01 AMJul 27, 2011 at 10:37 AM

Jacob Barker

It has been four months since Columbia learned Google would build its high-speed broadband network elsewhere. But the city and the University of Missouri haven’t given up on the idea of securing a network boasting speeds scores of times faster than what is available today.

City and university officials announced this morning that they are joining a consortium of research universities and their communities focused on securing ultra high-speed broadband networks.

Known as Gig.U, the group of communities hopes that by collaborating they will be able to entice providers to invest in ultrafast networks in their markets.

The funding for the first phase of the project, which includes developing a request for information that will be sent to internet service providers, is approximately $15,000 and will be split among the city ($6,000), MU ($7,500) and MORENet ($1,500), according to a university news release.

Project leaders hope that the initial investment will lead to grants for research and community infrastructure.

A business model to secure high-speed broadband still needs to be developed, Mayor Bob McDavid said, and he sees the consortium working together to build a model acceptable to Internet providers. “I’m actually convinced the demand’s going to be there,” McDavid said.

Columbia officials believe a network with download speeds as fast as 1 gigabit per second would benefit not only university researchers but the community’s cluster of high-tech companies such as Carfax, IBM and ABC Labs as well as smaller startups.

The Washington, D.C.-based consortium, which bills itself as the University Community Next Generation Innovation Project, said in an open letter that networks in college towns aren’t adequate for future research needs and there is no plan to upgrade network speeds quickly enough to retain U.S. research universities’ global dominance.

In the next 90 days, the group plans to send out a request for information to potential service providers that would be interested in building the new networks.

For providers wary of making a huge investment in a smaller market, the consortium hopes that by combining a number of cities and their universities, potential economies of scale could make the investment more attractive. Scale is the whole point behind the effort, said John Gillispie, the executive director of MOREnet. Gillispie heard a presentation on the effort back in April and passed along the idea to the city and the university to get involved.

“I don’t think we know what the results are going to look like yet,” Gillispie said. “This is very much a process where we’re trying to engage private-sector corporations to understand what they need to make these kinds of investments.”

Keith Politte of the Reynolds Journalism Institute at MU said many of the members who joined the effort are college towns that also attempted to woo Google.

“If you look globally, the U.S. needs to step up because there are many other countries around the world where this kind of high-speed broadband is just assumed,” he said.

There has been some interest from companies in the idea, McDavid said, but it’s still early in the process. “The private parties out there are exploring their capital needs,” he said.

Although no one is quite sure what will happen with the new speeds or how they’ll be used, most involved have faith that the applications will become evident as the service becomes available.

“No one’s really quite sure what happens when you build them,” Gillispie said. “If the past is any indication of what the future is, we’ll see lots of interesting things develop.”

Institutions that are charter members of Gig.U along with MU include: Duke University, University of Michigan, Penn State University, Case Western Reserve University, University of Chicago, University of Virginia, University of Kentucky, University of Louisville, University of Virginia, Arizona State University, Indiana University, Michigan State University, North Carolina State University, University of Alaska, University of Maryland, University of Florida, University of Hawaii and West Virginia University.